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spinach shrek cake

It has been one helluva week. Hubby ended up in hospital (and is still there now, 3 days on), nothing too serious, but something that needed to be monitored. Hopefully, fingers crossed, he will be out tomorrow. We are so close to the end of the school term, Friday next week is the last day, and I find myself struggling to keep everything together. I even said to Miss E the other day “you only need to read 4 pages of your reader because it’s nearly the end of term”. Complete lie. Thankfully my kids are pretty good readers, so I don’t tend to stress too much about that anyway, but still, my standards are slipping in more ways than one.

We have two toilets, and the ‘main’ toilet seat broke. Well, not entirely, a little plastic rod, that held the seat and the lid together snapped. Hubby said on Saturday that we just need to replace the whole seat, he would go Sunday to buy a new one, but then of course ended up in hospital. I’ve been flat out, and haven’t had a chance to go myself, so tonight I found myself snapping a pencil in half and using it as a rod replacement. Works perfectly!! Anyway, I’m bordering on delirious, so I’ll stop with all the chit chat and get on with the recipe…

A few days ago, I decided to look at what I had pinned onto my pintrest board for some inspiration, and I came across this recipe, I got a little bit excited, and couldn’t wait to try it out. So tonight, I finally whipped these up, and my kids absolutely LOVE these! I let them all try one before bed, seeing as we were all a bit traumatised after Miss E got stuck in the bathroom when the door handle fell off. That’s a story for another day though. I wasn’t sure how they would turn out, so I made 12 ‘shrek’ cupcakes, then added cacao to the other part of the batch and baked it as a chocolate loaf cake. I’ve got to say that the cupcakes were much nicer. I’ll be making another batch tomorrow I think as Miss E told me she couldn’t sleep because she kept thinking about how nice they are! As always, my photos don’t do these justice, they are really a lovely vibrant green, and the kids loved that I called them shrek cake.

This is actually a Turkish cake recipe called Ispanakli kek (spinach cake). It is quite sweet, and I didn’t reduce the sugar as I wasn’t sure how it would taste with the spinach, but I think you could easily reduce the sugar down to 1 cup. Also, the original recipe called for light olive oil, but I only buy extra virgin, which I thought would be too strong, so I used the coconut oil instead, and it was really nice in this cake. Also note that the spinach is raw, not frozen or cooked.

Firstly, blend the raw spinach until it is pureed to a baby food consistency. I did mine in the food processor, and it took 3-5 minutes to get it to this consistency.

Spinach after a few minutes in my food processor

Then I decided to just use my stick blender instead, and it was much easier.
Beat eggs and sugar together until light and creamy. Because my kenwood mixer is in need of repair, I used my stick blender to make this cake and it worked really well. Once I had blended the sugar and eggs together until creamy, I added the spinach, oil and lemon juice.

Wet ingredients
Then add the dry ingredients, flour and baking powder and blend until combined into a thick batter. Spoon into muffin cases or into a lined tray.
Bake for approx. 3o minutes in a moderate oven or until skewer comes out clean when inserted into the cake.

Straight from the oven. Kids loved these!

Gluten free option

So I wanted to try these with less sugar and thought I’d make them gluten free too. Here’s how I made it:

I followed the method as above. As you can see from the photo they didn’t rise as much as the first lot. My kids didn’t like these as much, but I really enjoyed these much more! I found the first lot a bit too sweet for me (which is why my kids gobbled them up!)

Hope your days (and your husband) improve quickly. I especially laughed at your toilet handle comment.Happened in my house and my son ( who was old enough to be left at home alone) was the unlucky victim. He was very pleased we weren’t out more than an hour ha ha